Multiple Fraud Led to a Retraction

The research journal Cancer Biology & Therapy retracted a paper recently in a case that was described as "nearly everything dishonest authors can do to doctor a manuscript, these authors did" by the web site Retraction Watch.

The paper in question have 5 authors, all from Huazhong University of Science and Technology (华中科技大学). According to the journal, at least 2 of the authors were not aware of their involvement in this paper, including one that is supposed to be the corresponding author. The other authors used a fake email address for the corresponding author to intercept any communication.

Besides such oddities, editors of the journal also found one figure in the paper is a re-publication of data in an earlier paper. "The authors have misrepresented their data as being from 2 separate cell lines," concluded the editors in the retraction notice.